(no subject)

My heart goes out to New Orleans.

I've never been there, but I've read "A Confederacy of Dunces" more than once, and "Liquor". A pale, pale substitute, but lord...I can't believe that. Believe what that place looks like now...it is, like a friend of mine said, as if the deluge has come, and we are on the wrong side of the water.

It should be said that this was a known danger. The Mississippi delta is right smack in the middle of hurricane territory. We know, mathematically, how often a storm this bad will hit that area. I'm sorry...but it seems to be to have been a matter of time. We have a habit of building in places that will get smacked with something like this, and we are upset when it happens. We can't stop nature. It's pretty simple, that way.

However...it also becomes obvious that we've neglected our infrastructure. We cut taxes. We cut programs. We pat ourselves on the back because we pay less in taxes. Our legislators get reelected on claims that they're tax cutters.

This is the result.

Dead soldiers in Iraq is the result.

We need to sit and think carefully...and maybe a little more altruistically, as well.